NOTES ON THE JUNETEENTH DECLARATION: A PRÉCIS ON LINCOLN’S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

SCRIPTURE. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and tell him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: “Let My people go, so that they may serve Me. But if you refuse to let them go and continue to hold them, now hear this: the hand of the Lord will fall on your livestock which are out in the field, on the horses, the donkeys, the camels, the herds, and the flocks—a horrible plague shall come.’” – EXODUS 9:1-3, AMP

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.” – “What to the American Slave is Your Fourth of July?” Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York,  July 5, 1852, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society; edited

1. FIRST THOUGHTS

Frederick Douglass’ fiery, bitter Rebuke, delivered 76 years after the American Declaration of Independence, and 10 years before Abraham Lincoln’s thunderous Executive Order on September 22, 1862 in the midst of the bloody Civil War, still echoes down the halls of American Justice to this very day.

VOTER SUPPRESSION. “A political strategy — usually at the party-level but sometimes conducted by zealous individuals — designed to prevent a group of would-be voters from registering to vote or voting.” – KELLIE PANTEKOEK, ESQ., ‘Find Law,’ updated August 07, 2020; edited

Whatever your politics, about which I care very little these days, as a follower of Christ, your recognition of the sustained inequities of White vs. Black America is vital to any remote hope of ameliorating those inequities anytime soon. Or ever, to be frank.

Christian journalist, defense policy analyst and contributing editor to‘The Week,’ BONNIE KRISTIAN had this to say in her thoughtful piece about the importance of President Biden’s Declaration of the Juneteenth Holiday to celebrate the End of Slavery in America.

“Many white Evangelicals, like our white compatriots more generally, are seeking to better understand what it’s like to be black in America—to learn how we can better have ‘the same mindset as Christ Jesus … not looking to [our] own interests, but to the interests of others,’ our black brothers and sisters (Philippians 2:4-5). Commemorating Juneteenth tomorrow is a good place to begin …

That it comes shortly before the Fourth of July is a chronological accident, but a useful one: We can mark Juneteenth before (or even instead of?) our more limited Independence Day. ‘Juneteenth helps us understand the history of this country in more honest ways than July 4th ever has, DREW G.I. HART, a theology professor at Messiah College and author of ‘Trouble I’ve Seen and Who Will Be A Witness?’ told me in an email interview. ‘Juneteenth, in contrast, offers a more honest view of the struggle for genuine freedom in the United States, which has often been delayed and denied to black people (and for our indigenous siblings).’ – “Juneteenth: A Truer Independence Day,” ‘Christianity Today,’ June 18, 2020; edited

1. THE REALITY

Again, no matter what your politics, no matter your color, no matter your age or religious convictions, certain facts need to be exposed to the Church, especially, about its Unholy Alliance with the Forces of the New Alt Right Nationalists engineered by Donald Trump.

Time for some brass tacks, beloved, In fact, long past time for them.

TRUMP ON ‘THE BLACKS.’ In his forthcoming book, ‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost (August 10, 2021), White House correspondent for ‘The Wall Street Journal’ MICHAEL C. BENDER writes:

“For Father’s Day in 2020, what Donald Trump mostly wanted was to avoid his son-in-law. It was Jared Kushner who had talked the president into hiring Brad Parscale to run a campaign that was now, just months before the election, in freefall. And when most Americans rejected Trump’s unreasonably truculent response to the civil unrest that was sweeping the country, the president also blamed Kushner. Trump privately told advisers that he wished he’d been quicker to support police and more aggressive in his pushback against protesters.

Trump had staked nearly his entire campaign in 2016 around a law-and-order image, and now groaned that the criminal justice reform that Kushner had persuaded him to support made him look weak and — even worse — hadn’t earned him any goodwill among Black voters.

‘I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks — it’s always Jared telling me to do this,’ Trump said to one confidante on Father’s Day. ‘And they all f—— hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.’”

DK’S TAKE. I have already written of the virulence of Trump’s White Nationalism’s infiltration of the Evangelical Church in America, so I won’t go over old, and very soiled ground. Suffice to say here that Trump’s brand of Christianity is hostile to the Spirit of Freedom expressed by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and entire Abolitionist Movement that preceded them.

1. THE TEACHING

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and tell him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: “Let My people go, so that they may serve Me. But if you refuse to let them go and continue to hold them, now hear this: the hand of the Lord will fall on your livestock which are out in the field, on the horses, the donkeys, the camels, the herds, and the flocks—a horrible plague shall come.’” – EXODUS 9:1-3, AMP

• “LET MY PEOPLE GO!” I want to focus on this historic Charge to Pharoah, and to the Trumpian Church in America today. The key word in this command is, in the Hebrew, ‘Shalach’ [שָׁלַח], translated as: “Shoot forth [from their bondage]; spread out like branches of a tree; to let loose; escort them away; to deliver or stretch out; set free.”

• IF YOU REFUSE. Here the Lord makes clear that there shall be the severest of punishments if His people are not emancipated. JOHN GILL makes the consequences painfully clear: “A very grievous murrain: or ‘pestilence’, a very noisome one, and which would carry off great numbers; the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan render it a ‘Death’, as the Jews commonly call a pestilence, whether on man or beast, because it generally sweeps away large numbers.”

DK’S TAKE. America suffers from many, many sins against The Lord of Heaven, not the least of which is a Barbarism, both expressed and suppressed, toward Minorites, certainly including people of color: Black, brown, red, and now more recently, yellow. And I haven’t even mentioned the stunning rise of Antisemitism here and abroad.

So, what is my point, to merely denigrate an America that is indisputably in a multilevel Crisis of unprecedented proportion? No. But rather to once again, still once more, issue a Call to the Church to take her stand against the White Nationalism that has infected the Nation of almost all her Churches.

I therefore turn to a dear friend and historian that I worked with at the Focus Leadership Institute back in the early 2,000s for a superb Three Step Strategy that Pastors and Leaders must engage if we are to make any difference in racial tensions in America in our generation.

1. TOWARD SOLUTIONS

In a frankly brilliant Biblical analysis of the horrors of Trump-fueled Nationalism in America today, GARY ALAN TAYLOR lays out Three Strategies for confronting, head on, these Two Great Distresses in our Land: Racism and Nationalism.

Clearly, one cannot be separated from the other.

The following is taken from his essay entitled, “Christ and Culture: Three Ways to Resist Christian Nationalism,” published in his flagship journal, ‘The Sophia Society,’ February 9, 2021; edited.

1. REMEMBER OUR ROOTS. “In its infancy, the Church was an underground, anti-imperial band of cultural misfits living on the margins of society. They had no power, little wealth, and shared all they had in common. They were universally nonviolent. And though they were hunted, persecuted, and oppressed, they prospered as a community of resistance to the brutal normalcy of the Roman Empire. This fledgling community saw the cross of Christ as the central political event in all of history, and realized the blasphemy of identifying any earthly political order with the Reign of God. That is, until the fourth century when Constantine arranged a little marriage between the bride of Christ and Caesar. Ever since then, Christians have been the great defenders of Empire, colluding with the powers that be to carve out our own, mostly white ‘Christian nation.’”

• FOLLOW THE WAY. “From His first testing in the desert to the last one in the Garden, Jesus’ unceasing temptation was the plea of the crowds and of His disciples to ‘strike out on the path of righteous kingship’ by bringing His Kingdom to fruition through power and coercion, writes theologian JOHN HOWARD YODER. Yet He never became a violent revolutionary. Whenever the disciples wanted to use force to bring about God’s good ends, He rebuked them. Peter, raising his sword in Christ’s own defense, was admonished: ‘Put away your sword,’ Jesus told him, ‘Those who use the sword will die by the sword’ (Matthew 26:52). The way of violence is not the way of Jesus. He chose to fulfill His Kingdom through weakness [i.e., humility], not coercion—which might be why the Religious Leaders of His day and ours would rather follow Barabbas the Insurrectionist rather than Jesus the nonviolent Resister.”

• SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. “For decades, white American evangelicals have become the de facto mouthpiece for Christian Nationalism, spouting lies, promoting conspiracy theories, and openly promoting racist policies at home and abroad. Televangelist Paula White, a member of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council, went so far as to claim God ordained the Trump presidency. Stranger still, Robert Jeffress, the Pastor of a megachurch in Dallas, turned ‘Make America Great Again’ into a hymn! How bizarre. How utterly unprophetic. The last thing we need are more courtly priests and pastors willing to cozy up to power. We need a counternarrative, prophets who speak truth to power.”

TOWARD HOUSE CHURCHES. Taylor concludes with a rather unusual, yet prophetic insight that immediately took me back to the newly budding ‘House Church Vision’ among us. Listen to his Call to the Original Church in this statement to see what I mean.

“Thankfully, Western Christians no longer enjoy the seats of power, but rather find ourselves participants in a pluralistic culture. And, much like the first three centuries of Christian history, this New Era provides an incredible opportunity to purify the message and methods of the Church, not least of which is to resist polluting the Gospel with our will to power. The end of ‘Christian America’ will create space for the Recovery of authentic forms of faith. In fact, ‘Post-Christian’ America may well prove to be far more Christian than Christendom.”

• LAST THOUGHTS

An iconic passage from the Old Testament that I recently quoted puts a rather delicious accent on Mr. Taylor’s last thoughts.

“Do not [earnestly] remember the former things; neither consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth; do you not perceive and know it and will you not give heed to it? I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” – ISAIAH 43:18-19, AMPC

Beloved, I believe with all my heart that these difficult and dangerous Last Days are designed to become our finest hour, so long as we hold on to The Vision of these times, and our role in them. I further believe that this little group, “these happy few,” are called to be a central participant in this New Thing God is doing.

THE LESSON. May the Church learn ever so quickly what is eloquently summarized by DAVID WILLIAM BLIGHT, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. 

“Well the Nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present. Douglass felt all Americans should never forget about the first day of January, 1863. He explains ‘Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night’ the Proclamation was signed. It was important for whites to appreciate black liberty and blacks to appreciate white ‘statesmanship.’” – ALBERT MORALES, “How Did Frederick Douglass View the Emancipation Proclamation?” ‘Mostly History,’ February 1, 2021; edited

THE QUESTION. In light of all this rich background, will the Church turn about and away from her recent infatuation, indeed, infection of Trump Nationalism, toward the Biblical View expressed by MARTIN LUTHER KING on August 28, 1963 on the Washington Mall:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

If so, then perhaps we can Right this ailing Ship of State and Reinvigorate our Lukewarm Churches. But if not, beloved, if not, I promise you that the One who walks among the Seven Golden Lampstands of the Church, shall surely thunder from Heaven, to remove every single one of those Lampstands from those Pastors who would lead them toward the Grand Imposter of our Era, Donald John Trump.

Ever your servant, DK